Painkillers + young athletes = addiction

About a decade ago Jack Riley, the DEA’s chief of operations, recognized that high school athletes were becoming “unwitting customers of the cartels,” which target people susceptible to prescription-drug abuse. The number of addicts and overdose victims has grown substantially since then. “In the athletic arena, if anything can be likened to a weapon of mass destruction, it’s heroin,” Riley says. “It is that pervasive now.”

While hard data for heroin use among young athletes are difficult to come by, the anecdotal evidence is abundant and alarming. A seven-month SI investigation found overdose victims in baseball, basketball, football, golf, gymnastics, hockey, lacrosse, soccer, softball, swimming, tennis, volleyball and wrestling—from coast to coast. Riley saw this as a volunteer in a youth basketball league in St. Louis. He coached a player who, years after suffering an injury, succumbed to a heroin overdose. The cartels, Riley says, “have developed a strategy, with the help of street gangs, to put heroin in every walk of life. They recognize how vulnerable young athletes are.”

Studies have shown that while cumulative pain levels remained constant among Americans, prescriptions for pain medications more than quadrupled between 1999 and 2010. As the sports industry expands each year—and the stakes on rinks, fields and courts grow higher—young athletes face enormous pressure to manage their pain and play through injuries.

A University of Michigan researcher uncovered a startling number in a 2013 national study: By the time high school athletes become seniors, approximately 11% will have used a narcotic pain reliever such as OxyContin or Vicodin—for nonmedical purposes. What’s more, UM researcher Philip Todd Veliz, who conducted a 2013 longitudinal study of 743 male and 751 female adolescents in southeast Michigan that was published in the Journal of Adolescent Health, told SI that “male adolescent athletes who participated in competitive sports across the three-year study period had two times greater odds of being prescribed painkillers during the past year and had four times greater odds of medically misusing painkillers (i.e., using them to get high and using them too much) when compared to males who did not participate in competitive sports.”

Moreover, “sports that involve high levels of contact (e.g., football) tend to socialize youth to view pain, violence and risk as normative features,” Veliz said, and these “may influence risky behavior both on and off the playing field. In other words, participants in contact sports learn to view their body as an instrument that can be easily gambled with, even if it would involve permanent damage.”

It’s disturbing enough that athletes come to heroin through painkillers prescribed after an injury. But SI’s reporting revealed a shocking contributing factor:

Families consistently said that they received no warning from physicians about the addictive power of the opioid painkillers they prescribed.

Patrick Trevor recalls that the doctor who prescribed Roxy for him jokingly said, “You got the good stuff.” Trevor adds, “I didn’t really put two and two together until later … when I was a full-blown heroin addict. I knew painkillers were not good, but I didn’t know how crazy addictive they were.”

In 2014 the CDC issued a report headlined PHYSICIANS ARE FUELING PRESCRIPTION PAINKILLER OVERDOSES. The study found that doctors were engaging in “dangerous” and “inappropriate” prescription practices. “Anyone who is giving a kid an opioid prescription without serious oversight and supervision is out of their mind,” says Joe Schrank, a New York City–based drug counselor and former USC offensive lineman. “That stuff is like kryptonite.”

Obamacare requires doctors to ask patients their pain level even if they are not in any pain.

They always ask on a scale of 1 to 10 what is your pain level. If you say 1 obamacare non doctors can tell your doctor to perscribe more opioids to patients because their records indicate there should be more perscribed!

(This information has been verified by nurses who work in doctor’s offices.)

These records are monitored by obamacare people who now control your health care.

If they suspect your doctor is not writing enough opioid drugs because their pain level obamacare records of patients indicate patients should have more drugs they can and do tell your doctor to perscribe more opioid drugs just because obamacare non doctors think it is necessary.

Obamacare is in effect a big drug kingpin who tells your doctor ie a “dealer” to sell more.

Obamacare makes doctors perscribe more opioids that are NOT necessary.

Drug company lobbists are in effect middle men drug dealers who take a cut along with obamacare fees and insurance costs!

All this can effect you because you doctor is induced to perscribe MORE opioid drugs.

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